[Beowulf] Mobo battery life in constantly on systems?

[andrew holway]

On 30/07/07, David Mathog <mathog at caltech.edu> wrote:
> "Robert G. Brown" <rgb at phy.duke.edu>
> > And yeah, it is a real PITA if you have anything non-default in your
> > BIOS settings.  Not so much a problem for clock settings, but if you
> > have to set up peripherals or memory (in older motherboards)
> > every time you boot...
>
> Exactly.  In this case the defaults that really hurt are:
>
> 1.  on keyboard error = halt (should be continue)
> 2.  ECC = off (should be scrub)
> 3.  Boot order FLOPPY DISK MBA (should be MBA FLOPPY DISK)
What's a floppy disk?
>
> The first one prevents a reboot (as there's no keyboard), the second
> one will eventually lead to memory errors, and the third wipes out
> control of the boot process via the master's dhcpd.
>
> Hopefully someday they'll start using flash memory for BIOS
> instead of a type that requires battery backup.
>
> Regards,
>
> David Mathog
> mathog at caltech.edu
> Manager, Sequence Analysis Facility, Biology Division, Caltech
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